


The Fox and the Doll

by Red



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Erik is a Father, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Pre-Canon, pre-x-men apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 23:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7075723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One spring day, Erik finds himself running to the rescue... of a doll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fox and the Doll

**Author's Note:**

> This fic comes from a [tumblr post](http://listerinezero.tumblr.com/post/145280256925/no-but) and comments from [Listerinezero](http://archiveofourown.org/users/listerinezero/pseuds/listerinezero)! :D Thanks so much for inspiring me. 
> 
> Thanks to [MssDare](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mssdare) for her help with the tiny bit of Polish! (Two words: "daddy" and "my little star", are in here.)

Sundays, Erik watches Nina on his own. Magda works down in the town, and gets most of their week’s shopping out of the way—they’ve been here for years, now, but old habits and secrecy die hard—and Erik gets some of the chores done around the house.

He’s in the kitchen, a quiet Sunday in April. The weather has been warming up, the birds nesting in the trees, and there’s no keeping Nina inside for long. He’s washing the dishes from lunch, idly tracking her by the motion of her locket. When he looks up, he can see her through the kitchen window—utterly engrossed, as she always is, holding court with her friends.

It’s when he’s putting up the plates that he hears it.

A shout, followed by crying.

“ _Tatuś_! _Tatuś_ —” he hears Nina yell, and his blood turns to ice. He drops the plate in his hand, lets it shatter on the tiles, and runs outside.

“Nina!” he calls out. He still has her locket held in his powers but—frantically, he realizes how little good that does. He can’t carry her or drag her by it. He can’t even protect her with it, without seeing or sensing who it is, hurting her.

And though he feels the locket coming toward him, as if Nina is running his way as he runs to her, the time it takes before he’s got her in sight seems impossibly long.

“Nina,” he says, dropping to his knees half so he can check her over, and half just out of sheer relief. He doesn’t think he _could_ stay upright any longer, legs weak with the sudden absence of adrenaline. Nina’s crying, her hair’s tangled and messy as it always seems to be. But she seems utterly unharmed.

He brushes back her hair, checking for bruises. “What’s wrong, _gwiazdeczko_? What happened?”

Magda always says he fusses over her too much, that he over-indulges her, that she’ll wind up spoiled one day. And maybe she’s right.

Nina sniffles, wipes her face against the too-long sleeves of her coat.

Maybe Magda’s right. But then, Erik can’t help but notice how she always runs for Nina, too. How much Magda dotes on her, endlessly, constantly. After so many years of nothing but loss, how could they do less for this gift, this precious blessing?

“Papa,” she starts—switching to English, now that he’s nearby—before she breaks out into tears once again. He hugs her close, petting her back as he scans the forest around them. But, aside from a few small songbirds and the big crow he’s begrudgingly accepted as Nina’s best friend, they’re alone.

“What is it? Nina—”

She sniffs again, her face buried against his shirt. She sobs something against him, something he only half-understands about— _foxes_?

“What did you say?” he asks, pulling back a little to look at her.

She blinks up at him, and rubs her nose. “Mama will be too mad,” she says, forlornly. Erik finds he has to bite his lip, not to smile at that.

“Who would Mama be mad at?” he asks. “I know Mama wouldn’t be mad at you, no matter what.”

Nina considers that information, before wiping at her face again. Erik resigns himself to doing the laundry today, as well.

“She’ll be mad at me and Tod,” Nina says, voice all seriousness. At least she seems to have taken her dad into confidence, Erik thinks, as she tugs at his hand. “Come see.”

Erik gets up from his knees carefully, keeping his eye on Nina. She’s still a little tearful, but looks now to be trying to put on a brave face. The crow swoops beside them, branch to branch. It clicks something that makes her smile, draws her out of her mood a little more where Erik couldn’t.

They don’t walk far. Behind a large tree, Erik very quickly finds the scene of the crime.

“Ah,” he says, reaching down. “Poor Sara.”

Sara looks even worse than when he first met her, holes ripped through her face and stomach, trails of her scant stuffing tugged out onto the forest floor. 

Nina watches as he picks up the doll, as he turns the tiny thing over in his hands.

“Mama’s doll—” she starts, before breaking out again in tears. Flustered, Erik tucks the doll up under his arm.

“Nina, darling,” he says, casting for the right thing to say. The brief time he had with Anya decades ago was no practice for this; she had been only two when he lost her. “It’ll be okay.”

“Tod, he just—we were playing and I told him…”

“Who’s Tod?” he asks, when he’s sure she’s done with her thought. With Nina, it could be anything. In the time since she’s manifested fully, Erik’s grown accustomed to phrasing it like that— _who_ , not _what_ —no matter what he may think of some of Nina’s companions.

“He’s not good with dolls,” she says, unnecessarily.

Erik can’t help grinning, then. He nods, conceding her point.

“I should say not. Is he a tiger?”

Nina shakes her head, makes a face so very like Magda’s, when she’s frustrated with him. “No! There’s no tigers here!”

“Oh. You're right,” he says, “So, an alligator, then—”

“Papa,” she says, seriously. “He’s a fox.”

“I see,” Erik replies. In that case, he thinks, the name is a little on the nose. Sometimes it happens that way, he’s found; even if Nina’s unaware of a particular word in one language or another, the animal itself seems to give a name corresponding to some folktale, to some odd noun. Perhaps, he thinks often, there’s been mutants like her before. “And he had very sharp teeth, I see.”

Briefly, Erik wonders if he shouldn’t warn Nina off of such animals. If he shouldn’t—he doesn’t know— _forbid her_ from speaking to them. Surely it can’t be safe, surely there’s a risk of disease, of her being attacked.

But as he sees her rub at her eyes again, as she tells him that she—and the fox—didn’t mean any harm… 

Erik knows, without any doubt, he’ll never be able to deny her so much.

“Shhh,” he soothes, brushing back her hair. “Sara will be fine, I promise.”

Nina looks dubious, and Erik takes her hand, walking her back to the house.

“You know how Papa knows?” he asks. He and Magda had been wary of telling her a great many things, not the least of which concerned the only two gifts of their pasts they had left to give her. The locket, Erik had made, but he’d told her little about those in the pictures he’d placed inside. The doll was much more concrete, but like the photographs—it was all Magda had, the solitary remainder of a childhood taken from her. Erik knows Sara’s story isn’t his to tell.

But he thinks, walking hand-in-hand with his daughter to their house… Magda would understand if he shared just a little of it.

“Once upon a time,” he starts, “Sara went on a very, very long journey. This was before Papa and Mama met. It was a journey full of danger and trouble. By the time I met your Mama, Sara looked almost like a fox had got her.”

Nina’s hand squeezes his, tight. When he looks down at her, she still looks a little suspicious, but at the same time curious.

“What happened then?” she asks, as they walk in the house. Erik guides her to the front room, has her sit on the couch while he reaches his powers out for the tin full of mending supplies, high on the top of their bookshelf.

“Then,” he says, sitting beside her and opening the tin to reveal the needles and thread and scraps of fabric within, “she got better.”

He smiles down at his daughter, who is by now far more interested in the contents of a mysterious tin than she is her dad. 

Just as well, he thinks, shoving the stuffing back in the doll while Nina’s not watching.

“And it wasn’t long after that,” he continues, hovering a needle in the air to thread it, “Sara got to meet you.”

Nina glances up at him briefly, grinning before she goes back to fishing buttons out of the tin. “And Tod,” she says.

“And Tod,” Erik agrees, settling in to mend this doll, unbelievably for the second time.

And Erik’s sure—innocent as she may _seem_ , sorting ribbons and buttons—that if Nina and her odd friends have anything to say about it, this won’t be the last.


End file.
